Well, that was fun! Here’s a snapshot of what happened on day two of RampUp 2019:

Insight #1: Be just as obsessed with your customers as you are about data.

During the Halt Disruption with Data Intelligence fireside chat, Cars.com CMO Brooke Skinner Ricketts told us how she’s obsessed with data. But what really keeps her up at night is attributing that data to real customers and delivering value based on the data.

As a “20-year startup,” Cars.com is a third-party marketplace that connects buyers to sellers. Having real insight from analyzing buyers’ behaviors helps them update sellers on shifting interests—like whether a buyer who was once interested in a specific car brand is now interested in another make and model.

Insight #2: The privacy policy debate will only continue to become more complex.

During the Industry vs. Government: Who Should Lead Privacy Policy? session yesterday afternoon, Ken Dreifach from ZwillGen challenged legislators to develop laws around data use that don’t limit access to content and other beneficial use. On the other side of the coin, Justin Brookman from Consumer Reports pushed for clearer and less subjective guidelines, and limiting loopholes that sidestep privacy concerns. It’ll be interesting to see how this debate develops.

Insight #3: Voice is going through a renaissance.

Email and social media has been the way people prefer to be served when things go wrong. A situation has to be pretty bad for someone to pick up the phone and call a company. That’s why voice data had been shuffled to the bottom of the pile.

However, this is no longer the case: “When we think about voice, we think of word-of-mouth marketing first and then telemarketing, which is now thought of as antiquated. With the onset of voice assistance, it’s hot again,” said Viji Davis, CMO of DialogTech, on our panel Harnessing the Power of Voice Data.

For companies that make the effort to organize all of the unstructured data lying in wait and convert it into usable first-party data, the payoff can be tremendous in winning the battle for voice search and more importantly, pleasing the consumer.

As we close out RampUp 2019 and get ready to hit the road, we’re reminded of what Chris Curtin, Chief Brand & Innovation Marketing Officer of Visa said this morning:

And by what Billy Beane, our closing keynote speaker, said to a rapt audience: “We stopped investing in skill sets that didn’t correlate with winning.”

Hope you were inspired by what you heard at RampUp 2019 and bring it back to your workplace and your customers, per Sarah Kennedy Ellis’s advice yesterday. Thanks for coming!

Bonus insight:want a free pass to RampUp 2020? Enter the RampUp 2019 Bag and Tag sweepstakes. All you have to do is take a picture of you running an errand with your RampUp 2019 bag, share it with #RampUp19, and tag us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Check out our terms and conditions here. Good luck!